April 01, 2017

A Day in the Life

Friday: A "get 'er done" day fraught with wall-to-wall speed programming. Gosh these programming emergencies feel exhausting and today was just nonstop fun and excitement.

After work dropped off wrong-sized shorts at UPS, as delivered yesterday. I'm starting to think when you order sizes they take it as a "nice to have". As in, "it'd be nice to deliver him a XL but he'll settle for a medium". Second time that's happened in the past month.

Then off to pick up more of that daily bread called beer.

Back home took dogs on their customary 7-minute constitutional. (It only feels like 20 mins.) No rabbits were harmed during this interlude.

Finally my time: The rich rigatoni repast of recliner. I watched some baseball, a brainless enough change activity. Then the sweet mercy of having food delivered via amazon.com/restaurants. This time Rusty Bucket, a good fish dinner, suggested tip was $5 and no delivery fee. Nice.

Finally the Presanctified Byzantine liturgy at the Eastern church I favor. The inertia factor seems to increase every year but I was bound and determined to do this (and, hopefully, the Stations of the Cross). It's like I'm trying to keep up with my past self. Forty-five minute round trip. But the liturgy worked its magic and re-centered me.

Later I thought about how I meant to ask Dylan for what emotions he feels when he hears the tune "When I Ruled the World" by ColdPlay. Specifically not about the lyrics, but the song tune itself. It seems ineffably sad, combined with a wistfulness. Later, after having heard the lyrics clearly it's no wonder it's a downer of a song, to put it mildly - the singer is expressing his damnation ("I know St Peter won't let me in"). Seems a case where the lyrics match the tune in terms of the emotions evoked.

Saturday: Ah, let the healing begin. The morning began grumpily, as I was in severe reading and coffee deficit. A bit of tension over my wife's concern over my overfeeding the dogs - both are slightly overweight. I kept thinking that feeding the dogs ain't so easy since bending over ain't that easy at 53 and three quarters.

Slept in till after 8am on the strength of an important repetitive morning dream: I had discovered via a google popularity search that the phrase "leader of the free world" was used often in 2008 with Obama, but not in '16 with Trump. This was a miscarriage of justice, another case of liberal bias. A few hours after waking I figured I go through the motions and check the search term popularity and it spiked majorly (or bigly) just after Trump was elected. The opposite of what my dream foretold. Likely because pundits were sarcastically offering, "this guy is the leader of the free world?"

But by 10am I was satisfying my drought by consuming the latest National Review. It was a good issue, with a dense retrospective of a visit to Jerusalem by Richard Brookhiser, a sobering look at how Chuck Berry's invention of rock and roll changed us all, pieces on Calexit and the French elections, and a review of the Ignatius Press history book on the bishops of New York City.

From the article on Chuck Berry:

The electrification of the id at a young age doomed students to an impoverished spiritual and intellectual life, [Allan] Bloom believed: “Rock music provides premature ecstasy and, in this respect, is like the drugs with which it is allied.”

A culture influenced by rock is fundamentally different — more individualistic, more pleasure-centered, more rebellious — from what prevailed before 1955.... We live in the lyrical and spiritual universe of the Chuck Berry song.

Ain't it the truth. "We ain't delinquents, we're misunderstood" goes the West Side Story lyric, or in this case, "We ain't delinquents, we just listened to rock growing up."

Friend Ron had sent me the book Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and I'd put off looking at it since it seemed to me a statement of the obvious: that Islam is greatly flawed and so let's read about someone with an axe to grind about it. I was prepared to tell him that I was more interested in the genesis of Islam than it's current often malicious execution. But when Ron asked if I'd read it, I felt the call to at least start it. And it's surprisingly engaging and well-written. Read it for an hour or two after an early Outback dinner. No wonder it's a best-seller. I should know that bestsellers don't get that way by accident.

Steph left this evening for, of all things, a weight-lifting conference in Dayton which features the author of a book she's reading on strength training. Aaron is the evangelist here - he told her about the author and asked her to come to Dayton with him and two of his lifting buddies. (An interesting foursome.) Aaron never does anything half-assed, be it his job, child-begetting, or physical training. When he was into running, he had to run a marathon. Similarly now in workouts, he's dedicated to the nth degree. Plus three kids in this day and age is probably equal to 5 in 1950. (Somewhere the Hodges are laughing.) He's definitely not of a phlegmatic constitution.

So Steph will be gone from 5 till at least 11pm. Bachelorizing tonight.

I appear to be on a book buying jag. Fourteen for the month of March; almost one every other day, yikes. I guess it's in case there's a book famine.

Fortunately ten were $2-$4, so it's understandable. The pricier selections include the Dominican Sisters' Manual of Marian Devotion (impulse buy because it was 40% off on St. Benedict day) and Fantasy Life, because it's a baseball picture book that followed minor leaguers along their journey, which is like crack cocaine to me. Those two were about $45. Ideally I could just stop buying right now for a couple years just read what I have to my heart's content. But somehow I think I won't do that. At the very least I can just buy the $2-3 offerings. These books are like rabbits, reproducing endlessly. Which reminds me of the Jonah Goldberg funny about dog-walking:

But now because the foul, oh-so-hoppy scent of bunnies is everywhere, leash walks take an eternity. She has developed a basset-like obsession with olfactory investigation.

Speaking of which, I took the dogs on this overcast Columbus (pardon the redundancy) day to the local park near the senior center. It's a place I'd taken Maris many a time when she was a puppy but never Max. So now Maris got to introduce Max to this particular park. It was uneventful till the end when I decided stupidly to go off the path, onto the grass near the forest, where of course I ended up falling on the slickness and landing on my backside in a mile-long puddle. It rained 25 inches yesterday, so grasslands have become tricky-to-identify swamps. My back pocket held my iPhone, and I was nervous for awhile I'd ruined it by getting it too wet. It got plenty wet, but apparently not too wet.

Why this URL?

Why "poncer.blogspot.com"?

PONC is the business acronym for "Price Of Non-Conformance", which basically means putting a price-tag on a screw-up. This from a faddish business book from long ago. We were impressed someone could make money writing lines like "quality is free".

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